The Later Works of Titian Part 4

[Footnote 2: According to the catalogue of 1892, this picture was formerly in the sacristy of the Escorial in Spain. It can only be by an oversight that it is therein described as "possibly painted there,"

since t.i.tian never was in Spain.]

[Footnote 3: It is especially to be noted that there is not a trace of red in the picture, save for the modest crimson waistband of the St.

Catherine. Contrary to almost universal usage, it might almost be said to orthodoxy, the entire draperies of the Virgin are of one intense blue. Her veil-like head-gear is of a brownish gray, while the St.

Catherine wears a golden-brown scarf, continuing the glories of her elaborately dressed hair. The audacity of the colour-scheme is only equalled by its success; no calculated effort at anything unusual being apparent. The beautiful naked _putto_ who appears in the sky, arresting the progress of the shepherds, is too trivial in conception for the occasion. A similar incident is depicted in the background of the much earlier _Holy Family_, No. 4. at the National Gallery, but there the messenger angel is more appropriately and more reverently depicted as full-grown and in flowing garments.]

[Footnote 4: Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. i. pp. 396, 397; _Tizian_, von H. Knackfuss, p. 55.]

[Footnote 5: Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Appendix to vol. i. p. 448.]

[Footnote 6: No. 1288 in the Long Gallery of the Louvre.]

[Footnote 7: See the canvas No. 163 in the Imperial Gallery of Vienna.

The want of life and of a definite personal character makes it almost repellent, notwithstanding the breadth and easy mastery of the technique. Rubens's copy of a lost or unidentified t.i.tian, No. 845 in the same gallery, shows that he painted Isabella from life in mature middle age, and with a truthfulness omitting no sign of over-ripeness.

This portrait may very possibly have been done in 1522, when t.i.tian appeared at the court of the Gonzagas. Its realism, even allowing for Rubens's unconscious exaggeration, might well have deterred the Gonzaga princess from being limned from life some twelve years later still.]

[Footnote 8: Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. i., Appendix, p. 451.]

[Footnote 9: The idea of painting St. Jerome by moonlight was not a new one. In the house at Venice of Andrea Odoni, the dilettante whose famous portrait by Lotto is at Hampton Court, the Anonimo (Marcantonio Michiel) saw, in 1532, "St. Jerome seated naked in a desert landscape by moonlight, by ---- (sic), copied from a canvas by Zorzi da Castelfranco (Giorgione)."]

[Footnote 10: See "The Picture Gallery of Charles I.," _The Portfolio_, January 1896, pp. 49 and 99.]

[Footnote 11: The somewhat similar _Allegories_ No. 173 and No. 187 in the Imperial Gallery at Vienna (New Catalogue, 1895), both cla.s.sed as by t.i.tian, cannot take rank as more than atelier works. Still farther from the master is the _Initiation of a Bacchante_, No. 1116 (Cat. 1891), in the Alte Pinakothek of Munich. This is a piece too cold and hard, too opaque, to have come even from his studio. It is a _pasticcio_ made up in a curiously mechanical way, from the Louvre _Allegory_ and the quite late _Education of Cupid_ in the Borghese Gallery; the latter composition having been manifestly based by t.i.tian himself, according to what became something like a custom in old age, upon the earlier _Allegory_.]

[Footnote 12: A rather tiresome and lifeless portrait of Ippolito is that to be found in the picture No. 20 in the National Gallery, in which it has been a.s.sumed that his companion is his favourite painter, Sebastiano del Piombo, to whom the picture is, not without some misgivings, attributed.]

[Footnote 13: It has been photographed under this name by Anderson of Rome.]

[Footnote 14: In much the same position, since it hardly enjoys the celebrity to which it is ent.i.tled, is another masterpiece of portraiture from the brush of t.i.tian, which, as belonging to his earlier middle time, should more properly have been mentioned in the first section of this monograph. This is the great _Portrait of a Man in Black_, No. 1591 in the Louvre. It shows a man of some forty years, of simple mien yet of indefinably tragic aspect; he wears moderately long hair, is clothed entirely in black, and rests his right hand on his hip, while pa.s.sing the left through his belt. The dimensions of the canvas are more imposing than those of the _Jeune Homme au Gant_. No example in the Louvre, even though it competes with Madrid for the honour of possessing the greatest t.i.tians in the world, is of finer quality than this picture. Near this--No. 1592 in the same great gallery--hangs another _Portrait of a Man in Black_ by t.i.tian, and belonging to his middle time. The personage presented, though of high breeding, is cynical and repellent of aspect. The strong right hand rests quietly yet menacingly on a poniard, this att.i.tude serving to give a peculiarly aggressive character to the whole conception. In the present state of this fine and striking picture the yellowness and want of transparency of the flesh-tones, both in the head and hands, gives rise to certain doubts as to the correctness of the ascription. Yet this peculiarity may well arise from injury; it would at any rate be hazardous to put forward any other name than that of t.i.tian, to whom we must be content to leave the portrait.]

[Footnote 15: This is the exceedingly mannered yet all the same rich and beautiful _St. Catherine, St. Roch, with a boy angel, and St.

Sebastian_.]

[Footnote 16: See Giorgione's _Adrastus and Hypsipyle (Landscape with the Soldier and the Gipsy)_ of the Giovanelli Palace, the _Venus_ of Dresden, the _Concert Champetre_ of the Louvre.]

[Footnote 17: It is unnecessary in this connection to speak of the Darmstadt _Venus_ invented by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, and to which as a type they so constantly refer. Giovanni Morelli has demonstrated with very general acceptance that this is only a late adaptation of the exquisite _Venus_ of Dresden, which it is his greatest glory to have restored to Barbarelli and to the world.]

[Footnote 18: _Die Galerien zu Munchen und Dresden von Ivan Lermolieff_, p. 290.]

[Footnote 19: Palma Vecchio, in his presentments of ripe Venetian beauty, was, we have seen, much more literal than Giorgione, more literal, too, less the poet-painter, than the young t.i.tian. Yet in the great _Venus_ of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge--not, indeed, in that of Dresden--his ideal is a higher one than t.i.tian's in such pieces as the _Venus of Urbino_ and the later _Venus_, its companion, in the Tribuna. The two Bonifazi of Verona followed Palma, giving, however, to the loveliness of their women not, indeed, a more exalted character, but a less p.r.o.nounced sensuousness--an added refinement but a weaker personality. Paris Bordone took the note from t.i.tian, but being less a great artist than a fine painter, descended a step lower in the scale.

Paolo Veronese unaffectedly joys in the beauty of woman, in the sheen of fair flesh, without any under-current of deeper meaning. Tintoretto, though like his brother Venetians he delights in the rendering of the human form unveiled, is but little disquieted by the fascinating problem which now occupies us. He is by nature strangely spiritual, though he is far from indulging in any false idealisation, though he shrinks not at all from the statement of the truth as it presents itself to him. Let his famous pictures in the Anticollegio of the Doges' Palace, his _Muses_ at Hampton Court, and above all that unique painted poem, _The Rescue_, in the Dresden Gallery, serve to support this view of his art.]

[Footnote 20: Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life of t.i.tian_, vol. i. p. 420.]

[Footnote 21: Two of these have survived in the _Roman Emperor on Horseback_, No. 257, and the similarly named picture, No. 290, at Hampton Court Palace. These panels were among the Mantua pieces purchased for Charles I. by Daniel Nys from Duke Vincenzo in 1628-29. If the Hampton Court pieces are indeed, as there appears no valid reason to doubt, two of the canvases mentioned by Vasari, we must a.s.sume that though they bore Giulio's name as _chef d'atelier_, he did little work on them himself. In the Mantuan catalogue contained in d'Arco's _Notizie_ they were entered thus:--"Dieci altri quadri, dipintovi un imperatore per quadro a cavallo--opera di mano di Giulio Romano" (see _The Royal Gallery of Hampton Court_, by Ernest Law, 1898).]

[Footnote 22: The late Charles Yriarte in a recent article, "Sabionneta la pet.i.te Athenes," published in the _Gazette des Beaux Arts_, March 1898, states that Bernardino Campi of Cremona, Giulio's subordinate at the moment, painted the Twelfth _Caesar_, but adduces no evidence in support of this departure from the usual a.s.sumption.]

[Footnote 23: See "The Picture Gallery of Charles I.," _The Portfolio_, October 1897, pp. 98, 99.]

[Footnote 24: Nos. 529-540--Catalogue of 1891--Provincial Museum of Hanover. The dimensions are 0.19 _c._ by 0.15 _c._]

[Footnote 25: Of all Pordenone's exterior decorations executed in Venice nothing now remains. His only works of importance in the Venetian capital are the altar-piece in S. Giovanni Elemosinario already mentioned; the _San Lorenzo Giustiniani_ altar-piece in the Accademia delle Belle Arti; the magnificent though in parts carelessly painted _Madonna del Carmelo_ in the same gallery; the vast _St. Martin and St.

Christopher_ in the church of S. Rocco; the _Annunciation_ of S. Maria degli Angeli at Murano.]

[Footnote 26: No. 108 in the Winter Exhibition at Burlington House in 1896. By Franceschini is no doubt meant Paolo degli Franceschi, whose portrait t.i.tian is known to have painted. He has been identified among the figures in the foreground of the _Presentation of the Virgin_.]

[Footnote 27: See a very interesting article, "Vittore Carpaccio--La Scuola degli Albanesi," by Dr. Gustav Ludwig, in the _Archivio Storico dell' Arte_ for November-December 1897.]

[Footnote 28: A gigantic canvas of this order is, or rather was, the famous _Storm_ of the Venetian Accademia, which has for many years past been dubitatively a.s.signed to Giorgione. Vasari described it as by Palma Vecchio, stating that it was painted for the Scuola di S. Marco in the Piazza SS. Giovanni e Paolo, in rivalry with Gian Bellino(!) and Mansueti, and referring to it in great detail and with a more fervent enthusiasm than he accords to any other Venetian picture. To the writer, judging from the parts of the original which have survived, it has long appeared that this may indeed be after all the right attribution. The ascription to Giorgione is mainly based on the romantic character of the invention, which certainly does not answer to anything that we know from the hand or brain of Palma. But then the learned men who helped Giorgione and t.i.tian may well have helped him; and the structure of the thick-set figures in the foreground is absolutely his, as is also the sunset light on the horizon.]

[Footnote 29: This is an arrangement a.n.a.logous to that with the aid of which Tintoretto later on, in the _Crucifixion_ of San Ca.s.siano at Venice, attains to so sublime an effect. There the spears--not brandished but steadily held aloft in rigid and inflexible regularity--strangely heighten the solemn tragedy of the scene.]

[Footnote 30: Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life of t.i.tian_, vol. vi. p. 59.]

[Footnote 31: The writer is unable to accept as a genuine design by t.i.tian for the picture the well-known sepia drawing in the collection of the Uffizi. The composition is too clumsy in its mechanical repet.i.tion of parts, the action of the Virgin too awkward. The design looks more like an adaptation by some Bolognese eclectic.]

[Footnote 32: This double portrait has not been preserved. According to Crowe and Cavalcaselle, the full length of Pier Luigi still exists in the Palazzo Reale at Naples (not seen by the writer).]

[Footnote 33: The writer, who has studied in the originals all the other t.i.tians mentioned in this monograph, has had as yet no opportunity of examining those in the Hermitage. He knows them only in the reproductions of Messrs. Braun, and in those new and admirable ones recently published by the Berlin Photographic Company.]

[Footnote 34: This study from the life would appear to bear some such relation to the finished original as the _Innocent X._ of Velazquez at Apsley House bears to the great portrait of that Pope in the Doria Panfili collection.]

[Footnote 35: This portrait-group belongs properly to the time a few years ahead, since it was undertaken during t.i.tian's stay in Rome.]

[Footnote 36: The imposing signature runs _t.i.tia.n.u.s Eques Ces. F.

1543._]

[Footnote 37: The type is not the n.o.bler and more suave one seen in the _Cristo della Moneta_ and the _Pilgrims of Emmaus_; it is the much less exalted one which is reproduced in the _Ecce h.o.m.o_ of Madrid, and in the many repet.i.tions and variations related to that picture, which cannot itself be accepted as an original from the hand of t.i.tian.]

[Footnote 38: Vasari saw a _Christ with Cleophas and Luke_ by t.i.tian, above the door in the Salotta d'Oro, which precedes the Sala del Consiglio de' Dieci in the Doges' Palace, and states that it had been acquired by the patrician Alessandro Contarini and by him presented to the Signoria. The evidence of successive historians would appear to prove that it remained there until the close of last century. According to Crowe and Cavalcaselle the Louvre picture was a replica done for Mantua, which with the other Gonzaga pictures found its way into Charles I.'s collection, and thence, through that of Jabach, finally into the gallery of Louis XIV. At the sale of the royal collection by the Commonwealth it was appraised at 600. The picture bears the signature, unusual for this period, "Tician." There is another _Christ with the Pilgrims at Emmaus_ in the collection of the Earl of Yarborough, signed "t.i.tia.n.u.s," in which, alike as to the figures, the scheme of colour, and the landscape, there are important variations. One point is of especial importance. Behind the figure of St. Luke in the Yarborough picture is a second pillar. This is not intended to appear in the Louvre picture; yet underneath the glow of the landscape there is just the shadow of such a pillar, giving evidence of a _pentimento_ on the part of the master.

This, so far as it goes, is evidence that the Louvre example was a revised version, and the Yarborough picture a repet.i.tion or adaptation of the first original seen by Vasari. However this may be, there can be no manner of doubt that the picture in the Long Gallery of the Louvre is an original entirely from the hand of t.i.tian, while Lord Yarborough's picture shows nothing of his touch and little even of the manner of his studio at the time.]

[Footnote 39: Purchased at the sale of Charles I.'s collection by Alonso de Cardenas for Philip IV. at the price of 165.]

[Footnote 40: Crowe and Cavalcaselle, _Life of t.i.tian_, vol. ii., Appendix (p. 502).]

[Footnote 41: Moritz Thausing has striven in his _Wiener Kunstbriefe_ to show that the coat of arms on the marble bas-relief in the _Sacred and Profane Love_ is that of the well-known Nuremberg house of Imhof. This interpretation has, however, been controverted by Herz Franz Wickhoff.]

[Footnote 42: Cesare Vecellio must have been very young at this time.

The costume-book, _Degli abiti antichi e moderni_, to which he owes his chief fame, was published at Venice in 1590.]

[Footnote 43: "Das Tizianbildniss der koniglichen Galerie zu Ca.s.sel,"

_Jahrbuch der koniglich-preussischen Kunstsammlungen_, Funfzehnter Band, III. Heft.]

[Footnote 44: See the _Francesco Maria, Duke of Urbino_ at the Uffizi; also, for the modish headpiece, the _Ippolito de' Medici_ at the Pitti.]

[Footnote 45: A number of fine portraits must of necessity be pa.s.sed over in these remarks. The superb if not very well-preserved _Antonio Portia_, within the last few years added to the Brera, dates back a good many years from this time. Then we have, among other things, the _Benedetto Varchi_ and the _Fabrizio Salvaresio_ of the Imperial Museum at Vienna--the latter bearing the date 1558. The writer is unable to accept as a genuine t.i.tian the interesting but rather matter-of-fact _Portrait of a Lady in Mourning_, No. 174 in the Dresden Gallery. The master never painted with such a lack of charm and distinction. Very doubtful, but difficult to judge in its present state, is the _Portrait of a Lady with a Vase_, No. 173 in the same collection. Morelli accepts as a genuine example of the master the _Portrait of a Lady in a Red Dress_ also in the Dresden Gallery, where it bears the number 176. If the picture is his, as the technical execution would lead the observer to believe, it const.i.tutes in its stiffness and unambitious _navete_ a curious exception in his long series of portraits.]